Since Mick's been slow to post lately, I checked out Syndik8's other notable blogging personality and found a host of fascinating material. First, Irish has a nifty "case study" on Aaron Wall's network of SEO-related websites:

Though all these sites are totelly (sic) legitimate with the search engines, he works at truly black hat volumes - as a result his network covers every conceivable topic and through his personality as the centre of this network ties it all to SEO and consequently to the SEO Book.

I also enjoyed his entry on the lifespan of Blogger blogs, which covers how traffic starts flowing to the site, where the clicks to ads come from and what the end results are:

OK Blogger blogs are not as popular with black hats as they once used to be but some still use them though it takes more skill to get anything out of them nowadays. Hence, I thought it might be useful to trace a pattern I seem to see with most Blogger blogs. This pattern, though it doesn’t really tell you what exactly to do with your blogs, can be useful in getting the most out of Blogger’s service.

It's fun to hear what the black hats are up to and how the loopholes in Google's technology are being exploited on a large level to create more ad middlemen.